An embodiment relates generally to vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) applications relate to co-operative communications for a vehicle based on two-way communications for interacting in real time. These systems are preferably directed to traffic management, collision warning, and collision avoidance. Such systems can extend a host vehicle's range of awareness of surrounding environmental conditions by providing relevant information regarding the status of traffic in addition to any safety related events occurring in proximity to or detected by vehicles near the host vehicle.
A substantial cost is involved in incorporating security protection regards to V2V applications. The cost incurred is that of the computational power required to process security, specifically (1) for creating a secure message at the transmitter and (2) to verify the integrity of this secure message at a receiving node. The information exchanged between the vehicles in V2V communications must be secured to prevent a malicious user from hacking into the communication system and presenting false data which disrupts the V2V application service.
Messages in V2V communications are secured by appending a unique digital signature to the message. The digital signatures are typically based on asymmetric key cryptography and are the digital equivalent of hand-written signatures. At the receiving end of a vehicle communication, a digital signature algorithm is used to verify the signature. If a digital signature is authenticated, the messages are transferred to the application layer for processing the data with the message.
Verifying the message using a digital signature algorithm is based on a variety of mathematically intensive algorithms. The use of such algorithms is computationally intensive owing to an enormous number of mathematical computations such as multiplications, squaring, and inversions that need to be accomplished for every signature to be generated or verified. The use of processors within a vehicle communication systems such as those used in Vehicle Computing Platforms that cater to CAN and LIN buses and Flexible Computing Platforms that cater to Bluetooth and USB communication mediums are not designed to handle computational intense operations. As an alternative, an ASIC/FPGA (Application Specific Integrated Circuit/Field Programmable Gate Array) can be used to perform the digital signature authentication can be used. The cost of such hardware for these standalone processors removes the computational bottleneck that typically occurs with standard computing processors; however, the cost is undesirably high.